2. NLP Analysis

Speaker analysis

• What are the most important characters based on scene apperances, lines and words?
• Can we identify the main characters and the supporting characters?
• How do the importances of the characters change over time?
• Can we detect key moments in the show based on speech portions?

Preprocessing for Speaker Analysis

• Extract directorials (and remove deleted scenes + respective column):

param_dict = {
    "concat_scenes": False,
    "extract_direc": True, 
    "remove_punct": False, 
    "rmv_stopwords": False,
    "lwr": False, 
    "exp_contractions": False,
    "conversion": None
}

df = preprocess(df_raw, **param_dict)
df.head()

	season	episode	scene	line_text	speaker	season_episode	directionals
id
1	1	1	1	All right Jim. Your quarterlies look very good...	Michael	101	NaN
2	1	1	1	Oh, I told you. I couldn't close it. So...	Jim	101	NaN
3	1	1	1	So you've come to the master for guidance? Is ...	Michael	101	NaN
4	1	1	1	Actually, you called me in here, but yeah.	Jim	101	NaN
5	1	1	1	All right. Well, let me show you how it's done.	Michael	101	NaN

fig = px.bar(char_app_count_sorted, x='speaker', y='counts', color='season', color_discrete_sequence=px.colors.qualitative.Prism, title='Scene appearances per character')
fig.update_xaxes(categoryorder='array', categoryarray= top_char)

fig = px.bar(lines_per_character.sort_values("season"), x="speaker", y="line_text", color='season', color_discrete_sequence=px.colors.qualitative.Prism, title='Lines per character')
fig.update_xaxes(categoryorder='array', categoryarray= top20_characters)
fig.update_yaxes(title='number of lines')

fig = px.bar(words_per_character.sort_values("season"), x="speaker", y="word_count", color='season', color_discrete_sequence=px.colors.qualitative.Prism, title='Words per character')
fig.update_xaxes(categoryorder='array', categoryarray= top20_characters)
fig.update_yaxes(title='number of words')

Conclusions:

• Michael is overall the most frequent appearing character
• Dwight, Jim, Pam and Andy are other frequently appearing (and thus important) characters
• the order of the supporting characters differs depending on what is counted (scene appearances, lines, words)
• some characters only appear in specific seasons (e.g. Michael 1-7 or Robert 8)

Development over time

fig.show()

• certain events in the show can be identified (only some are displayed)
• Michael clearly dominates in terms of speech portions and is (after season 7) "replaced" jointly by Dwight, Jim, Pam and especially Andy

Word Analysis

• Primarly: extracting frequent or important words from lines
• Can we identify words that are specifically relevant (in certain parts of the show)?
• Can we derive information on the speaking style in the show from the words used?

Preprocessing

• extract directorials
• remove punctuation
• lowercase
• expand contractions
• tokenize lines: TreeBankWord + tokenize special self-defined tokens: character names (e.g. "Michael Scott") and compound words (e.g. "Dunder Mifflin")

param_dict_tokens = {
    "concat_scenes": False,
    "extract_direc": True, 
    "remove_punct": True, 
    "rmv_stopwords": False,
    "lwr": True, 
    "exp_contractions": True,
    "conversion": "tokenize",
    "tokenizer": ("TreeBankWord", True, PATH+"character_names.csv", PATH+"compound_words_the-office_by_chatgpt.txt")
}

df_tokens = preprocess(df_raw, **param_dict_tokens)
df_tokens.head()

	season	episode	scene	line_text	speaker	season_episode	directionals
id
1	1	1	1	[all, right, jim, your, quarterlies, look, ver...	Michael	101	NaN
2	1	1	1	[oh, i, told, you, i, could, not, close, it, so]	Jim	101	NaN
3	1	1	1	[so, you, have, come, to, the, master, for, gu...	Michael	101	NaN
4	1	1	1	[actually, you, called, me, in, here, but, yeah]	Jim	101	NaN
5	1	1	1	[all, right, well, let, me, show, you, how, it...	Michael	101	NaN

Word Cloud

all_words =  [item for sublist in df_tokens["line_text"].tolist() for item in sublist]
all_words_freq = nltk.FreqDist(all_words)
df_all_words_freq = pd.Series(dict(all_words_freq)).sort_values(ascending=False)

wordcloud = WordCloud(width=800, height=300, background_color="white", max_words=100, contour_width=3, contour_color='steelblue').generate(" ".join(all_words))
wordcloud.to_image()

• mostly words that are common in everyday language use
• also some names of characters
• topic related words are rare (e.g. job, office, work, call, party, friend, love)

Most frequent words

fig = px.bar(y=df_all_words_freq[:16].index, x=df_all_words_freq[:16].values, orientation='h', title='Most common words', height=450)
fig.update_layout(yaxis_title='Word', xaxis_title='Frequency')
fig.show()

• same conclusion as above: words that are frequently used in general, no nouns

New preprocessing: additionally remove stopwords

fig2 = px.bar(y=df_all_words_freq[:16].index, x=df_all_words_freq[:16].values, orientation='h', title='Most common words (after stopword removal)', height=450)
fig2.show()

• same words as in word cloud

Important Words

Tagging

• tag words with part-of-speech (POS) tags to identify most common words by lexical category (especially nouns)

1. Brill Tagger was used, but did not show sufficient results.
2. POS Tagger as second approach:

param_dict_tokens_nostopwords = {
    "concat_scenes": False,
    "extract_direc": True, 
    "remove_punct": False, 
    "rmv_stopwords": False,
    "lwr": True, 
    "exp_contractions": False,
    "conversion": "pos_tag"
}
df_tokens_tagged = preprocess(df_raw, **param_dict_tokens_nostopwords)
df_tokens_tagged.head()

	season	episode	scene	line_text	speaker	season_episode	directionals
id
1	1	1	1	[(all, DT), (right, JJ), (jim., NN), (your, PR...	Michael	101	NaN
2	1	1	1	[(oh, UH), (,, ,), (i, JJ), (told, VBD), (you....	Jim	101	NaN
3	1	1	1	[(so, RB), (you, PRP), ('ve, VBP), (come, VBN)...	Michael	101	NaN
4	1	1	1	[(actually, RB), (,, ,), (you, PRP), (called, ...	Jim	101	NaN
5	1	1	1	[(all, DT), (right., NN), (well, RB), (,, ,), ...	Michael	101	NaN

import plotly.io as pio
pio.templates.default = "plotly_white"

all_tagged_freq = nltk.FreqDist(all_words_tagged_filtered_jj)
df_all_tagged_freq = pd.Series(dict(all_tagged_freq)).sort_values(ascending=False).drop('i')

fig2 = px.bar(y=df_all_tagged_freq[:10].index, x=df_all_tagged_freq[:10].values, orientation='h', title='Most common Adjectives', height=450)
fig2.update_traces(width=0.5)
fig2.show()

all_tagged_freq = nltk.FreqDist(all_words_tagged_filtered_nn)
df_all_tagged_freq = pd.Series(dict(all_tagged_freq)).sort_values(ascending=False)

fig3 = px.bar(y=df_all_tagged_freq[:10].index, x=df_all_tagged_freq[:10].values, orientation='h', title='Most common Nouns', height=450)
fig3.update_traces(width=0.5)
fig3.show()

TF-IDF

to determine important words in the dataset

features_tfidf_agg[0:10]

you     0.072911
is      0.056919
to      0.054235
the     0.052029
it      0.047500
that    0.040082
pam     0.039464
not     0.038828
and     0.037477
do      0.032911
dtype: float64

Lexical Dispersion Plot

target_words = ['birthday', 'wedding', 'scranton', 'stamford', 'philly', 'dundie', 'farm', 'boat', 'manager']
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(10,4))
visualizer = DispersionPlot(target_words, ax=fig.add_subplot(111))
visualizer.fit([all_words])
visualizer.show();

n-grams

finder_2 = nltk.collocations.BigramCollocationFinder.from_words(all_words)
finder_3 = nltk.collocations.TrigramCollocationFinder.from_words(all_words)
finder_3.ngram_fd.most_common(18)

[(('let', 'us', 'go'), 203),
 (('let', 'us', 'get'), 107),
 (('hey', 'hey', 'hey'), 78),
 (('whoa', 'whoa', 'whoa'), 63),
 (('oh', 'god', 'oh'), 59),
 (('na', 'na', 'na'), 55),
 (('let', 'us', 'see'), 52),
 (('go', 'go', 'go'), 49),
 (('one', 'two', 'three'), 45),
 (('stop', 'stop', 'stop'), 44),
 (('god', 'oh', 'god'), 41),
 (('come', 'let', 'us'), 39),
 (('blah', 'blah', 'blah'), 37),
 (('ha', 'ha', 'ha'), 35),
 (('okay', 'let', 'us'), 34),
 (('yes', 'yes', 'yes'), 33),
 (('wait', 'wait', 'wait'), 32),
 (('get', 'back', 'work'), 31)]

• interesting 3-grams support that everyday spoken language is used in the show (colloquial language/slang)
• characteristic: oh, god, oh
• few topic related 3-grams: e.g. get back work

Word Analysis by Speaker: Michael vs. Dwight

Most common words: Michael vs. Dwight

fig.show()

3-grams: Michael vs. Dwight

df_ngrams_michael_dwight

	ngram Michael	ngram Dwight
0	((let, us, go), 75)	((let, us, go), 38)
1	((let, us, get), 35)	((hey, hey, hey), 21)
2	((hey, hey, hey), 26)	((yes, yes, yes), 17)
3	((come, let, us), 23)	((let, us, get), 15)
4	((oh, god, oh), 21)	((ha, ha, ha), 13)
5	((beep, beep, beep), 21)	((go, go, go), 13)
6	((let, us, see), 18)	((jim, jim, jim), 12)
7	((god, oh, god), 17)	((wait, wait, wait), 10)
8	((stop, stop, stop), 16)	((whoa, whoa, whoa), 9)
9	((na, na, na), 16)	((la, la, la), 9)
10	((go, let, us), 13)	((let, us, see), 7)
11	((yeah, yeah, yeah), 13)	((michael, michael, michael), 7)
12	((right, right, right), 13)	((zero, zero, zero), 7)
13	((blah, blah, blah), 13)	((volunteer, sheriffs, deputy), 6)
14	((go, go, go), 13)	((one, two, three), 6)

Sentiment Analysis

• Which sentiments dominate in the show and how do they develop over time?
• Can the sentiments describe the development of a relationship in the show?

Sentiments: negative, neutral, positive

First sentence of the show

sia = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()
sia.polarity_scores("All right Jim. Your quarterlies look very good. How are things at the library?")

{'neg': 0.0, 'neu': 0.803, 'pos': 0.197, 'compound': 0.4927}

Sentiment development in a certain episode

Episode "Goodbye Michael"

# display sentiment over time for a given season and episode
px.line(df_rolling[(df_rolling["season"] == 7) & (df_rolling['episode'] >= 21) & (df_rolling['episode'] < 22)], 
        x="id", y=["neg", "neu", "pos"], title="Sentiment over time", color_discrete_sequence=['rgb(213,94,0)', 'rgb(240,228,66)', 'rgb(0,158,115)'], height=400)

Conclusion:

• when there are discussions and short arguments the positive sentiment notably lowers down
• at the end, when michael leaves, the sentiment is very positive

Additionally, SpacyTextBlob and a transformer model for sentiment analysis (cardiffnlp/twitter-roberta-base-sentiment) was evaluated.

Sentiment Analysis with different emotions

pd.DataFrame(emotion_analysis)[["anger", "disgust", "fear", "joy", "neutral", "sadness", "surprise"]].rolling(20).mean().plot(cmap="Dark2", figsize=(12,4))
plt.xlabel("lines")
plt.ylabel("degree")
plt.title("Emotions throughout the series: Jim & Dwight", fontsize=18)
plt.show()

• the relationship between Jim an Dwight is becoming less neutral in the course of the show
• consistent with the storyline where they develop a special kind of "friendship" towards the end
• note that this is a moving average, e.g. peaks may be flattened here

pd.DataFrame(emotion_analysis)[["anger", "disgust", "fear", "joy", "neutral", "sadness", "surprise"]].rolling(20).mean().plot(cmap="Dark2", figsize=(12,4))
plt.xlabel("lines")
plt.ylabel("degree")
plt.title("Emotions throughout the series: Jim & Pam", fontsize=18)
plt.legend(frameon=True, framealpha=.8)
plt.show()

• generally: emotional rollercoaster
• line 101: Jim asks Pam for a date
• events cannot be exactly derived from the plot due to moving average

Topic Modeling

• What topics do people talk about in "The Office"?
• How does this change over time?

Approaches:

• LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) with preprocessing through tf*idf scores and CountVectorizer - results for 10 topics not sufficient
• Embeddings with SBert, Dimension reduction with UMAP, Clustering with HDBSCAN
  • Analysis of the results by retrieving top words (by count and tf*idf) per topic - mixed results (roughly 60 topics)
  • iterative topic reduction with cosine similarity (merge most similar topics) - topicx become more general (no value adding results)

New approach: BERTopic

topics, probs = topic_model.fit_transform(data_unp) 

# show the results (more than 900 topics)
topic_model.visualize_topics()

• over 900 topics
• topics are overlapping in 2D representation --> could me merged?

# show the results (only first 10 topics)
topic_model.visualize_barchart([1,2,3,4,32,50,105,106])

Topic Reduction

topic_model.reduce_topics(data_unp, nr_topics=30)

topic_model.visualize_topics()

topic_model.visualize_barchart([1,5,16,21], width=225)

• topic 5: birthday + christmas related, but also "and" --> topic reduction also introduces impurity

Topics over Time

topic_model.visualize_topics_over_time(topics_over_time, topics=[5,7,14], width=960, height=400)

• topics over time correspond to certain events in the show

Network Analysis

• Which people in "The Office" interact with each other?
• How does this change over time?

• network changes over time
• certain characters are introduced or leave the show (Andy, Creed, Michael)
• network becomes more balanced (i.e. supporting characters have more interactions)